Melvin Lawrence DeFleur was a professor and scholar in the field of communications. His initial field of study was social sciences.
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science, psychology, marketing, and advertising. In public relations and communication science, it is one of the more ambiguous concepts in the field. Although it has definitions in the theory of the field that have been formulated from the early 20th century onwards, and suffered more recent years from being blurred, as a result of conflation of the idea of a public with the notions of audience, market segment, community, constituency, and stakeholder.
Agenda setting describes the "ability to influence the importance placed on the topics of the public agenda". The theory suggests that the media has the ability to shape public opinion by determining what issues are given the most attention, and has been widely studied and applied to various forms of media. The study of agenda-setting describes the way media attempts to influence viewers, and establish a hierarchy of news prevalence. Nations judged to be endowed with more political power receive higher media exposure. The agenda-setting by media is driven by the media's bias on things such as politics, economy and culture, etc. The evolution of agenda-setting and laissez-faire components of communication research encouraged a fast pace growth and expansion of these perspectives. Agenda-setting has phases that need to be in a specific order in order for it to succeed.
Communication studies or communication science is an academic discipline that deals with processes of human communication and behavior, patterns of communication in interpersonal relationships, social interactions and communication in different cultures. Communication is commonly defined as giving, receiving or exchanging ideas, information, signals or messages through appropriate media, enabling individuals or groups to persuade, to seek information, to give information or to express emotions effectively. Communication studies is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge that encompasses a range of topics, from face-to-face conversation at a level of individual agency and interaction to social and cultural communication systems at a macro level.
Mass communication is the process of imparting and exchanging information through mass media to large population segments. It utilizes various forms of media, since technology has made the dissemination of information for efficient. Primary examples of platforms utilized and examined include journalism and advertising. Mass communication, unlike interpersonal communication and organizational communication, focuses on particular resources transmitting information to numerous receivers. The study of mass communication is chiefly concerned with how the content and information that is being mass communicated persuades or affects the behavior, attitude, opinion, or emotion of the people receiving the information.
In media studies, mass communication, media psychology, communication theory, and sociology, media influence and themedia effect are topics relating to mass media and media culture's effects on individuals' or audiences' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. Through written, televised, or spoken channels, mass media reach large audiences. Mass media's role in shaping modern culture is a central issue for the study of culture.
George Gerbner was a professor of communication and the founder of cultivation theory. He taught at Temple University, Villanova University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Mass media are the means through which information is transmitted to a large audience. This includes newspapers, television, radio, and more recently the Internet. Organizations that provide news through mass media in the United States are collectively known as the news media in the United States.
Dietram A. Scheufele is a German-American social scientist and the Taylor-Bascom Chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. Prior to joining UW, Scheufele was a tenured faculty member in the Department of Communication at Cornell University.
In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies organize, perceive, and communicate about reality.
James William Tankard Jr., communication scholar, author of The Statistical Pioneers and coauthor of Communication Theories: Origins, Methods, Uses.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to communication:
Various aspects of communication have been the subject of study since ancient times, and the approach eventually developed into the academic discipline known today as communication studies.
Journalism culture is described as a "shared occupational ideology among newsworkers". The term journalism culture spans the cultural diversity of journalistic values, practices and media products or similar media artifacts. Research into the concept of journalism culture sometimes suggests an all-encompassing consensus among journalists "toward a common understanding and cultural identity of journalism."
Mediacracy is a situation in government where the mass media effectively has control over the voting public. Mediacracy is closely related to a theory on the role of media in the United States political system, that argues that media and news outlets have a large level of influence over voting citizens' evaluations of candidates and political issues, thereby possessing effective control over politics in the United States.
Community structure theory provides a powerful framework for analyzing society's influence on media coverage. It has been identified by Funk and McCombs (2015) as the “conceptual inverse” of agenda-setting, focusing on demographic characteristics of communities shaping news instead of news as a driver of public perception. For example, community structure theory has found repeated links between indicators of vulnerability and favorable coverage of critical US national issues such as immigration reform or universal health care. Further, in cross-national studies comparing national characteristics and reporting on human trafficking, HIV/AIDS treatment access, water handling/contamination, and child labor, media coverage varied significantly with levels of "female empowerment"— female literacy rate, female child life expectancy, and female school life expectancy.
John Crothers Pollock is a US social scientist and communication scholar specializing in health communication, public health, human rights, and community structure theory. He is currently a professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Public Health at The College of New Jersey, where he has taught since 1992. He was educated at Swarthmore College, The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Stanford University.
Donald Lewis Shaw, one of the two founding fathers of empirical research on the agenda-setting function of the press, was a social scientist and a Kenan professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was born to Luther and Lowell Shaw on October 27, 1936 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Mary Angela Bock is a journalist and professor of journalism. She is an associate professor of journalism at University of Texas at Austin in the School of Media and Journalism with an expertise in visual communication, citizen journalism and representation.
